Life and Death in Palestine: Information gift for a Premier — Day 10

Israeli moral compass so twisted that even most decent people now justify ruthless killing of Palestinians.

No 1659 Posted by fw, May 2, 2016

As a reminder, scholar and educator Herbert Thelen inspired this protest project: “To act ignorantly when knowledge is available, to deny realities that patently exist and make a genuine difference, is the worst crime of civilized man.”

Israel’s crimes against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories are realities that patently exist. Why, then, when this knowledge is readily available, would Premier Wynne decide to lead a trade mission to Israel? I suggest this was not a responsibly informed decision.

Today, Day 10 of my letter-a-day, 19-day campaign to share with the Premier information gifts from alternative online news sources not readily found in North America’s mainstream news media, I sent the following message.

Although I conclude all my emails welcoming a reply, to date, not one has been forthcoming.

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Monday, May 2, 2016

Dear Premier Wynne,

Below is my information gift for you on this, Day 10, of my intended 19-day project to fill in some possible gaps in your knowledge base with respect to life and death in the Israeli Occupied Territories.

Introduction to today’s information gift –

Orly Noy, a Mizrahi Jew, female leftist and keyboard political activist, contends that “Our [Israeli] collective moral compass has become so fundamentally twisted that even the most decent of people, those who are not considered extremists, believe that there is nothing wrong with shooting a man as he lies dying on the ground…. The violent reality of occupation creates a consciousness that justifies that very violence. Every single day. That is the horrible meaning underlying our reality: even exposing the inhumane face of military rule does not cause the Israeli public to wake up from our coma — it only causes us to come up with more ways to justify it.”

Noy’s short article, with minor editing changes, is reposted below. To read the complete piece, as published in +972 — a blog-based web magazine jointly owned by a group of journalists, bloggers and photographers — click on the following linked title.

Our collective moral compass has become so fundamentally twisted that even the most decent of people, those who are not considered extremists, believe that there is nothing wrong with shooting a man as he lies dying on the ground.

One of the more dangerous and frustrating aspects of the fascism taking over the Jewish-Israeli public, led by its elected officials, is the way it is fed by every single thing that happens here. Nearly every piece of news pushes this process forward — even events that should serve as a warning sign.

For example, in the Israeli reality, Netanyahu knew exactly what he was doing, comparing Palestinians to Nazis and putting the blame for the Holocaust on the Palestinians rather than the Nazis. Netanyahu knows that once the noise dies down, he will have convinced a good portion of the population that the Palestinians were the ones responsible for the Holocaust — that they were the ones who incited Hitler to massacre the Jews. He knows that in the current climate, of all the dirt thrown at the Palestinians — no matter how baseless — something is bound to stick. The public could rise up against the lies, but instead it internalizes it.

A similar thing happens every time the public deals with another horrifying piece of news from the occupied territories. The effect is almost always the opposite: instead of being shocked, the public gives its stamp of approval — sometimes even an official one. The public was not horrified when it found out the extent of the killing of Palestinian civilians who were uninvolved in the last Gaza war. Instead, it led to a change in the IDF’s “ethical code” as formulated by Israeli philosopher and linguist Asa Kasher. Rather than shaking us to our core, we have come to accept that our soldiers’ lives come before the lives of Palestinian civilians — a notion that goes against international humanitarian law, not to mention most basic morality.

The violent reality of occupation creates a consciousness that justifies that very violence. Every single day. That is the horrible meaning underlying our reality: even exposing the inhumane face of military rule does not cause the Israeli public to wake up from our coma — it only causes us to come up with more ways to justify it.

END OF EXCERPT — To continue reading, click on the above linked title…